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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29126517">How does Harrow brush her hair? With a cata-comb</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniper_empress/pseuds/juniper_empress'>juniper_empress</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood, F/F, Haircuts, Harrowhark Being Bad At Haircuts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 06:01:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,811</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29126517</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniper_empress/pseuds/juniper_empress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gideon badly needs a haircut at Canaan House, so it's up to Harrowhark to become the hair stylist than the world needs. </p><p>She is, obviously, god-awful.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gideon Nav &amp; Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>35</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>How does Harrow brush her hair? With a cata-comb</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>(This is my first time ever writing fanfiction, so I'm very nervous posting this!! Please let me know what you think about it!)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Fuck you, asshole.” Harrow stormed out of the room. Harrow storming out of a room was like, Gideon imagined, confronting a very angry tree frog. Cute, unassuming, and not the least bit intimidating. Well, until you found out it was venomous, in which case you were toast. In this case, venom was bones, and the tree frog’s bones were… blood… and the metaphor was getting away from her. Gideon wasn’t in the mood to get a skeleton through her shoulder, again, so she let Harrow do her storming. Get a good storm out of her system.</p><p>Gideon sighed and looked around the bathroom, taking the towel off her head and catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She looked like an utter moron. </p><p>Well. To be frank, the whole situation was a calculated risk, even she had to admit it. Yesterday morning, after talking with Dulcinea and receiving some light teasing, it became obvious how badly Harrow needed a haircut. And with Harrow’s decree of silence… well, the idea of using mime or charades to ask Coronabeth if she’d be willing to play barber sounded as pointless as it was demeaning. But the alternative was to see Dulcinea’s quirked, dismissive mouth as she looked at Gideon’s hair all shaggy and untrimmed. It was obvious to anyone that Gideon would do anything to avoid that. So, she’d waited up last night reading magazines until Harrow had crash-landed on her bed in the early hours of the morning. The trick was to make sure Harrow was too tired to say no when Gideon cajoled her into it. </p><p>So, Harrow agreed, on the condition that she could cut it by bone. And that Gideon had her skull face-paint on, the whole time. Given that Gideon was getting pretty decent at her facepaint by this point, that wasn’t a huge concession - but cutting her hair by Harrow’s necromancy alone… Well, judging by how her hair looked right now, that turned out to be a god-awful idea, obviously.</p><p>It had started as well as you could imagine. Gideon had few reasons to ever doubt Harrow’s skills, having been on the receiving end of them more times than she could count. After picking the time and place (their spacious bathroom) Harrow had stalked around her in circles in a way that inspired some level of confidence. At least, that Harrow-specific kind of manic concentration that meant she was into the breach now and there was no turning back. As Gideon sat upright in the chair in the middle of the room, she caught snippets of Harrow muttering to herself about volume, shape, definition, fades, words Harrow had a purely academic understanding of, judging by her own ratty black scraggle. </p><p>With a complete lack of warning, she started to run her hands through Gideon’s hair. Her fingers traced across the scalp, slowly and methodically, like she was working through a particularly difficult theorem. Stroking in a circular pattern, and then twisting a strand of hair out, with an unreal level of tenderness. It was divine, and Gideon gasped audibly.</p><p>Delicately measuring the length of each pull, parting it back and forth as Harrow’s mind visibly raced in uncatchable indecision, whirling, twisting, focused. It was clear by the way Harrow deliciously was running hands across her head - god, it took all of Gideon’s energy to not snark at her, but it felt too good and she couldn’t stand Harrow stopping - as she pulled strands of Gideon’s flame-red hair out, measured it against a femur-shaped ruler, muttered to herself, and let it go again, in a huff. </p><p>Harrow half-crouched behind Gideon as she did this, looming from a three-legged stool like the gremliny gargoyle she was, and Gideon felt herself involuntarily leaning back. Wishing that Harrow would just hold her, feel Harrow’s breath, the beat of her heart, the feel of her hands, her skin, her mouth...</p><p>It had to end, at some point, obviously. Harrow stood on the stool and loomed harder. She poured her focus into two bone-chips that had, at some point, sprung into her palms. They grew to two jagged blades, with which she punctured with a long bone rod to create a hack job pair of shears. Gideon had seen enough of that bone handiwork to see when Harrow was doing shitty work, and with these shears, she was doing <em> especially </em>shitty. </p><p>Harrow’s bones often got sharp, but sharp like Gideon’s weak-ass rapier. Pointy, pokey, stab-you-through-the-ear-y. Harrow clearly hadn’t had a huge amount of practice in making <em> slicing </em>bones, which were what you needed for a pair of bone-shears. </p><p>Within less than a minute Harrow had given Gideon the worst shaggy-looking mullet in the history of the Ninth, with a set of bangs that sloped so steeply you could kick-flip off of it. </p><p>And that didn’t even account for the blood. When Harrow’s shears didn’t work, she let out her angry tree-frog ribbit she gave when she was mad with herself, and summoned skeletons. She went <em> full </em>skeletons. </p><p>This was familiar, because it happened every time Gideon came close to beating her. Harrow started muttering to herself at this point, “utterly ridiculous color… just as thick as your skull… unmanageable… embarrassment to the Ninth...”</p><p>Three of the skeletons pinned her to the ground in a way that Gideon nearly found fiendishly hot. In the cramped bathroom across from their quarters, loose clumps of red hair and wet towels flung across the floor, it was uncomfortable. And again, that didn’t account for the blood.</p><p>The skeletons were somehow worse than the shears. Their smooth, sharp precision movements so carefully crafted for battle did jack-shit when it came to cutting her hair, but did an A+ job at drawing blood from under her hair. It took a few seconds to realize that the red goop dripping down the front of Gideon’s face was her blood, and at that point she let out a guttural “gerrogggfff” as she bare-knuckle punched the rib cage out from the center of the skeleton on top of her, and the other two let her go. </p><p>Harrow was looking at her in horror, and loathing, and disgust, which Gideon found to be a bit rude. </p><p>“Well, this couldn’t have gone much worse,” Gideon tried to say brightly to Harrow, who was standing shell-shocked and furious with the bone-shears limp in her hand. She tried wiping one of her bangs out of her face, and it didn’t. </p><p>And then, of course, Harrow said “Fuck you,” and stormed out.</p><p>Gideon got up and washed her head to clear out the clumps of blood, now dried up. She felt around at her scalp with her fingers, hunting for cuts, but it seemed like everything was surface, thank God. She looked up, and caught herself in the mirror.</p><p>It would’ve been funny, Gideon thought, if it wasn’t her. </p><p>“Fuck, I look like a gay, dead, flaming otter. Fucking hell.” The idea of going outside to talk to literally anyone else was a complete joke. Just imagining the look on Dulcinea’s face at her hair was enough to force Gideon away from the mirror, and she sank back onto the stool. She’d just have to quit leaving the room. She’d get meals at night, beg teacher for a supply, and never look anyone in the face ever again. Once they figured out the secrets of Canaan house, she’d cover her head with a bag and throw herself into the darkest hole the Ninth had and never leave it again.</p><p>It only took one more look in the mirror to confirm this was the best possible course of action.</p><p> </p><p>---</p><p> </p><p>She barely had time to wallow. Quicker than she expected, quick enough to interrupt her half-baked plan of doing a stealth level all the way across Canaan House to Teacher to see if he had a spare razor that she could just buzz it off, Harrow was back. </p><p>With company.</p><p>“Well, you were right to bring me, Harrow. You did a bad job, in just about every respect of the word. Good God, girl.” Like a wave of deep violet relief, Abigail Pent swept through the room and sat herself beside Gideon, pair of sharpened steel scissors in one hand and a jar of alcohol-based sanitizer wipes in the other. </p><p>“You may not care for flesh necromancy, but hair isn’t flesh. It’s very similar, though. Just little protein nubbins. Sure, a good necromancer would be able to regrow out your hair, mend up your scars, et cetera. But I don’t claim to be a good necromancer.” Gideon flashed Harrow a look here, and she could see Harrow was beet-red and staring at the ceiling. The idea Harrow would go to desperately ask for help from someone who called themselves “not a good necromancer” is probably the sort of thing Harrow would eventually die from. Gideon nearly said that out loud before she remembered her vow of silence.</p><p>“Now, the most important thing about hair styling isn’t the layering, it isn’t the - well, it’s almost the - dear god, you didn’t even get her hair wet before you started? What are you, from the Niinth? Heh heh.” As she was talking, her hands were flying around, pushing her from the sink where she was dousing head and wiping down her scalp with alcohol and cleaning the cuts as her deft hands pulled chunks of hair taught and locks fell away with ease to the floor. “No, the most important thing is conversation. Making your haircut-ee comfortable, confident, and saying things like, <em> Wow, you truly have some gorgeous volume, Gideon </em> , or <em> Your color is incredible, people would kill for this natural coloring, </em>because then they enjoy the otherwise boring process of having protein nubbins shaved off your skull.”</p><p>She stood back for a moment, and appraised Gideon as one would look at a half-formed sculpture. “You do truly have incredible coloring for a ninth kid, Gideon. I’ve never seen anything like it. People would kill for that.” She turned back to Harrow, and sighed. “Well, the sides are going to have to come off, you did so bad that they’re unsalvageable.”</p><p>Harrow looked like she might attack Abigail right then and there, a Necromancer duel for the ages, and Gideon felt at her belt for her rapier before remembering it was back in her room. Well, it would be a deeply anticlimactic note to go out on.</p><p>She held her breath. Harrow narrowed her eyes and nodded, and the tension passed.</p><p>“Good. Fortunately, I thought ahead, and brought a trimmer with me in case someone ran into this issue, because I am prepared for this sort of thing. How long did you think we were going to be in this trial? I expected two to three years, but Magnus expected no longer than three days. So who gets accused of overpacking beforehand, and gets no thanks when she saves the day and remembers to bring nail clippers and hair trimmers? Of course it’s me.”</p><p>She looked back at Harrow, and with a hint of something odd in her voice, said, “Alright, Harrow. Now you’ll finish the job you started.”</p><p>Harrow’s blank face in the doorway was enough of a response for Gideon, but apparently not for Abigail, who gestured towards her, like she was talking to a scared puppy. </p><p>“No. What? No.”</p><p>“Yes. I saved most of the damage, so she won’t die from a head infection. She won’t even die blunt force trauma when the secret monsters of this house think she’s a particularly overgrown rat and step on her by accident. But you are going to do the sides, because I say so.”</p><p>Gideon kept her head still as she moved her eyes to look at Harrow. She was mortified, called out and with absolutely no choice but to move forward and grab the razor out of Abigail’s hand. Gideon then looked up at Abigail, and noted a conspiratorial twinkle in her eye, with suspiciously <em> this is a favor for your gay ass </em>subtext in the air between them. </p><p>Gideon swallowed loudly, and made an internal memo to herself that she owed Abigail one.</p><p>Harrow stared blankly a while longer, mouthed something rude, and finally said, “I can’t do it.”</p><p>“Yes you can, it’s not <em> magic </em> , it’s a haircut and she’s your cavalier. One flesh, one hair, one bloody scalp, etc. Now <em> come on </em>.”</p><p>Harrow took a tentative step forward like she couldn’t trust herself back inside the room - then another - and finally took place behind Gideon. Abigail started saying instructions that all drifted past Gideon’s ears now without finding purchase. All she felt was Harrow’s hands on her head, slowly massaging the sides at Abigail’s instruction, running her fingers through her hair, removing little bits of dried blood cruft with satisfying plunks. The soft buzzing of the razor began next to Gideon’s ears, and she felt the nervous race of Harrow’s heartbeat through the floor, the soft warmth of Harrow’s breath on the back of her neck, the calm precision of Harrow’s gaze on the back of her head, all her attention focused on her…</p><p>It was glorious. When it finished some time later (it could’ve been hours, Gideon wouldn’t know), she drifted back down to earth and heard, “There! Not so hard, was it?” Abigail patted Harrow on the back in a way deeply reminiscent of Magnus. It wasn’t hard, but it was hard enough that Harrow let out a nauseous “blurg”. </p><p>Harrow caught Gideon’s eye for a moment, and her face was absolutely bizarre. If Gideon didn’t know any better, she’d say that Harrow looked peaceful. It was absolutely foreign and her face clearly didn’t know what to do.</p><p>Harrow didn’t know what to do with it either, and blushed hard when she realized how long she’d been staring at Gideon. She thrust the razor back to Abigail and stood up throwing the stool behind her as she did, making a dart for the exit as fast as her legs could carry her.</p><p>“I…” she started, looking at Abigail, in the way an embarrassed four-year-old looks at a teacher who helped them clean up an uh-oh mess without letting the rest of the class see.</p><p>“You want to say thank you, but you don’t know how, so I’ll give you a hint: you just have to say thank you, and that’s it.” Abigail smiled back at Harrow, who was still blushing, but had a new eyebrows-raised called-out look that her face was practicing for the first time too. </p><p>“Thank you. The Ninth owes you a debt, Abigail Pent.” Harrow made an awkward bow.</p><p>“No it doesn’t, you absolute child. I helped you cut your cavalier's hair. That is a no-debt help and it was fun for me.” Abigail stood up, and pulled out a little hand-brush as she began to sweep up the mix of blood-red and regular-red hair across the tiled floor. </p><p>Harrow opened her mouth, couldn’t think of anything to say, and left without a word. </p><p>Abigaillaughed for a long time as she swept, and looked back to Gideon, who was still staring at the open doorway.</p><p>“Woof, kid. You’ve got your hands full with that one. Reminds me of Magnus, when I first was crushing on him. Haha -” her eyes lit up as she caught the look on Gideon’s face “-Not in personality, no, Magnus was never a little goth explosion like that one. God, wouldn’t that be cute, though? No, just that he was absolutely infuriated with himself all the time, thought he was utterly worthless, and couldn’t imagine why anyone would spend time courting him.”</p><p>She washed off her hands in the sink. “Fortunately, he didn’t realize that my love for him was more stubborn than his hate for himself. Because I loved him just as much as you and the skull princess back there.” Gideon’s face was growing hotter under the skull makeup and she was sure it was turning pink. </p><p>“Oh, this just isn’t fair, with you being so silent and so obviously horny for her. It’s like poking at a little fly that’s caught in a spiderweb.” At this Gideon spun around, staring at her aghast, and was just on the edge of speaking when, “Look, you’ll be fine. Obviously she feels the same way, you just need to have a modicum of respect for yourself. You’re not setting her a very good example.” She flicked the water off her hands and they left little droplets on the wall. </p><p>“Hope you have an excellent evening, Gideon the Ninth.”</p><p> </p><p>---</p><p> </p><p>She did. She spent the evening permanently burning the memory of Harrow’s hands into her brain, so that it would never leave her. Also, she couldn’t wait til she got to tell Harrow that Abigail had called her a “little goth explosion”. At that, Gideon marveled, Harrow might quite literally explode.</p>
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